"Re-election Drill" - In the last quarter the US produced six million barrels of conventional and unconventional oil a day.

                                            Photo By pp cam/ks/AFP Graphic.
       Oil demand down for North America and Europe, must be the economy "DOING FINE"



"Re-election Drill" - In the last quarter the US produced six million barrels of conventional and unconventional oil a day.(Yahoo).The United States is seeing a dramatic surge in oil and gas production and could overtake the world's biggest producers, Russia and Saudi Arabia, in another decade, a US official said. "Some of the numbers are eye-popping," Daniel Sullivan, commissioner in Alaska's department of natural resources, told a panel of experts at the International Economic Forum of the Americas in Montreal. In the last quarter the US produced six million barrels of conventional and unconventional oil a day, he said, adding: "We haven't done that in 15 years." Since 2008, the US added 1.6 million barrels of additional oil, and in 2011, the US registered the largest increase in oil production of any country outside of OPEC, he told hundreds of participants. In Alaska alone, the potential off the coast was viewed as the largest of any country, about 40 billion barrels in conventional oil, according to the US Geological Survey. US President Barack Obama has indicated that offshore oil resources could help mitigate global disruptions in supply, and his administration has tried to craft an energy strategy that balances business interests with environmental concerns, especially in the Arctic. In November the Obama administration proposed a new plan for offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off the coast of Alaska, including the environmentally sensitive Arctic. But it did not open up for exploration the politically sensitive Atlantic or Pacific coastlines, or the eastern Gulf of Mexico along the Florida coast. The chairman of the World Energy Council drew a more somber global picture. Pierre Gadonneix said the economic crisis meant energy demands had slowed down, even though they were starting to grow again, and that oil prices remained high. "Future growth is threatened by the prospect of climate change and the drain on our natural resources," he said, adding the main challenges would be to improve the security of energy supply, to improve competitiveness and to struggle against "energy poverty."Hmmmm.....Why the sudden increase in the last quarter?Trying to lower the Gasprices for Election day?Read the full story here.

MFS - The Other News

                        Morning Posting.

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity in Canada 5.3 , The Solomon Islands 5.2 and Tonga 5.1 ! More info here.

• Japan : For the most accurate info on the nuclear disaster go to : Paul Langley's Nuclear History Blog.Here.

• Geithner Plan for Europe is last chance to avoid global catastrophe.(Telegraph).By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.The threat of cascading default, bank runs, and catastrophic risk must be taken off the table," said US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner over the weekend."Sovereign and banking stresses in Europe are the most serious risk now confronting the world economy. Decisions cannot wait until the crisis gets more severe."Euroland's dysfunctional arrangements are no longer a local affair. As the European Central Bank's Jean-Claude Trichet said in Washington, EMU is at the epicentre of a global sovereign debt crisis that risks engulfing all, and is more intractable than 2008 because governments themselves are now crippled.China, India, Brazil and the world's rising powers will not escape lightly this time if leaders let events spiral out of control. European banks have lent $3.4 trillion to emerging markets (BIS data), or three quarters of external loans to these countries.The International Monetary Fund warned last week that emerging markets face the risk of "sharp reversals" or even a "sudden stop" if there is further spill-over from Europe. This comes at a time when Asia and parts of Latin America are already in the topping phase of a credit boom, one of epic proportions in China where loans have doubled to almost 200pc of GDP over the last five years.Warning signs have been flashing red for the last three weeks. Shares of China's top property developer Greentown have crashed by a third this month. The currencies of Indonesia, Brazil, Korea, South Africa, and Hungary have all buckled, and central banks have begun intervening to stop the slide. "A continued flight from risk raises the growing possibility of investor capitulation in emerging markets," said Neil Mellor from BNY Mellon.The reserve powers would be well advised to pull out all the stops to save Europe and its banking system. Together they hold $10 trillion in foreign bonds. If they agreed to rotate just 4pc of these holdings ($400bn) into Spanish, Italian, and Belgian debt over the next two years, they could offer a soothing balm. None has yet risen to the challenge. It is `sauve qui peut', with no evidence of G20 leadership in sight.Once again, the US has had to take charge. The multi-trillion package now taking shape for Euroland was largely concocted in Washington, in cahoots with the European Commission, and is being imposed on Germany by the full force of American diplomacy.It is an ugly and twisted set of proposals, devised to accommodate Berlin's refusal to accept fiscal union, Eurobonds, and an EU treasury. But at least it is big.The EU's €440bn bail-out fund (EFSF) will be "leveraged" from €440bn to €2 trillion to cope with Italy and Spain. The fund will assume an "equity" stake of 20pc or so in holdings of EMU debt, supported by loans of 80pc from the European Central Bank.Commercial banks that cannot raise money from Mid-East wealth funds will be seized by the state, partly or fully, or be recapitalized by the EFSF. This should leave them strong enough to absorb a 50pc default imposed on Greece, and potential knock-on defaults in Portugal and Ireland.Or at least, that is the idea. We will see how the Bundestag reacts this week. It has not even voted on the July deal to boost the powers of the EFSF, itself a furiously contested plan that may provoke a 30-strong rebellion within Chancellor Angela Merkel's own coalition. German lawmakers now learn that implicit liabilities may be five times as big."We should not think of leveraging a public pot of funds as a free lunch," said Ireland's central bank governor Patrick Honohan. Indeed not. The details of this financial engineering have a familiar ring to those who remember the `CDOs' and other instruments of structured disguise before the subprime debacle. The bill comes due.We will see too whether France is willing to swallow national pride and confront its own financial elite. Christian Noyer, the Bank of France's governor, denied on Sunday that French officials were mulling a capital injection of up to €15bn to beef up banks.Read the full story here.

• Obama’s Unpresidential Contempt for the GOP.(WHD).The president is president of all of us. Not just the Democratic Party. Even during a campaign.It’s one thing to lambaste your opponents and their ideas. But the president of the United States should not be describing the other Party as un-American. It’s worse than sordid, divisive politics. It’s an ignominious, even somewhat frightening thing for a president to do, and it demonstrates a real ignorance on the part of Obama about the Constitutional role of his position.Let’s look at what he said last night at a fundraiser in San Jose, California.Some of you here may be folks who actually used to be Republicans but are puzzled by what’s happened to that party, are puzzled by what’s happening to that party. I mean, has anybody been watching the debates lately?You’ve got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change,” he said, to applause. “It’s true. You’ve got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don’t have health care and booing a service member in Iraq because they’re gay. That’s not reflective of who we are . . .This is a choice about the fundamental direction of our country — 2008 was an important election; 2012 is a more important election.The key phrase above is “That’s not reflective of who we are.” As he has before – most notably in describing the budget by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) that was adopted by the House – Obama is suggesting that his opposition is un-American.He’s vilifying an entire Party with a couple of extreme examples.How dangerous for a president to think his values are America’s.Hmmmmm......"Come to the Dark side?"Read the full story here.

• Obama Is Dangerous for Peace.(AT).By James Lewis.The president of the United States has just destroyed the longest-lasting peace treaty in the Middle East. That Nobel Prize-winning treaty between Egypt and Israel was destroyed by Obama in broad daylight, right in front of God and everybody, with stunning audacity.The White House kept repeating the message that Mubarak must resign, and "now means now." This is simply unprecedented, even during the height of the Cold War. American presidents don't demand in public that their crucial allies resign. It is a diplomatic insult of unprecedented proportions.

And yet -- Obama said nothing when Iran's genocide-threatening regime killed and tortured thousands of demonstrators at the start of Obama's administration. He has said nothing about Syria's Assad sending tanks to fire on rebels in the city of Homs. He said nothing when the Saudis sent troops into Bahrain to violently suppress protests. Indeed, the White House has actively aided repression by regimes much worse than Mubarak was -- regimes in Yemen, Somalia, and Iran.

So what's going on? Was it just another opportunistic chance for Obama to parade his overweening ego? Or was it more sinister?Mubarak was the thirty-year strongman who preserved the single biggest pillar of Middle East peace, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. USA Today predicted that the peace treaty was in danger when Mubarak fell. Everybody knew. The Israelis kept telling Obama, and the Egyptians and Saudis must have done that as well. The Saudis, who are now facing a nuclear Iran fifty miles away, are walking away from their decades-long alliance with the United States. Nobody trusts American guarantees anymore.

Obama did it, knowing that the Arab world would break down into near-universal civil war. The so-called "Arab Spring" is a fraud. What we are seeing is an "Pan-Arab Civil War," from Tunisia to Yemen. Every country is in deep trouble, and Prof. Niall Ferguson, who has been warning about this catastrophe all along, now believes that famine and social warfare will come to Egypt and the others. They can no longer pay for the massive food imports they need to survive. Local capital has fled to safer places.

The Middle East has been "community disorganized." This is straight out of Saul Alinsky: community agitators destabilize communities so that they can push the remnants into whatever shape they want. The people who die are just too bad.This is so shocking, and so contrary to Obama's "peace" rhetoric, that few Americans can believe their own eyes, seeing that the biggest pillar of Middle East peace has been smashed right before them. This can only be a knowing move on the part of the Obama administration. Everybody who remembered the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty had to know.

Obama has now demanded that Israel retreat to its 1949 ceasefire lines --- which he lied about as the "1967 borders." Those 1949 lines would set Israel back to three large wars ago. It would turn Israel into one of those famous gerrymandered districts that look like a wriggling salamander.Those borders are indefensible, and they therefore would drive Israel into its ultimate defensive weapon: nuclear war. The radical leftist fantasy of threatening Israel with destruction runs into that brute fact: with its back to the wall, Israel would use nukes in self-defense. You cannot drive a nuclear power into a corner without it resorting to war.

The overthrow of Mubarak has destabilized the entire Middle East. Indeed, this Pan-Arab Civil War has already taken more lives than the Japanese tsunami...and it threatens to get worse. After half a century of warm and friendly relations, Turkey is now threatening naval war against Israel in the eastern Mediterranean.This is exactly how Iran fell back into its medieval tyranny in Jimmy Carter's time -- and don't doubt that that calamity was triggered by Carter and his NSC henchman Zbigniew Brzezinski. A million people died in the Iran-Iraq war that followed the radicalization of Iran. Thousands of innocent Green Revolution demonstrators are still dying today in the regime's horrific prisons and torture chambers.

The U.S. Sixth Fleet has kept the peace in the Mediterranean for sixty years. When the Sixth Fleet was doing its job, no American ally like Turkey would ever have threatened naval war against another ally like Greece or Israel. Turkey has warships, but nothing compared to the Sixth Fleet. It therefore follows that Obama is not allowing the USN to interfere with the Turkish naval threat.For thirty years the Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty sustained the fragile peace in the Middle East. Everything positive in Arab-Israeli relations was based on it. Stable relations between Israel and Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, and even Syria were all based on that solid-looking Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.

Then Mr. Obama tore it all down, right in front of our eyes.Israel is now surrounded by countries that used to be at peace, but which are now talking war. They are armed with high-tech missiles: tens of thousands of scud missiles in Syria; forty thousand missiles of various types in Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah, and therefore by Iran; thousands of Grad and more primitive missiles in Gaza. If the PA declares a state, it will try to import even more offensive missiles, just like Hamas did in Gaza.Finally, Iran now has IRBMs and the first ICBMs with nuclear weapons coming soon, which can easily strike Israel -- but Iran can also strike U.S. military bases and naval vessels within a radius of 1,000 miles and more, not to mention the nations of southern and eastern Europe. Once developed, Iranian ICBMs can reach the United States, China, and Russia.The President of the United States has therefore destabilized the Middle East in the most dangerous way, and he has done so in broad daylight. And yes, people are already dying in the tens of thousands -- so far, 90 percent Muslims. But others may start dying soon.Even now, American armed forces are in secret combat in Yemen, Libya, and Somalia, and elsewhere, to keep things from completely falling apart. U.S. soldiers are facing daily death to keep Obama's China shop from shattering.Obama knows that he's pulled the rug out, and U.S. forces are now engaged in unknown numbers of Muslim countries to try to shape the outcome.And yet America's political pundits have watched it happen, and they mostly have kept silent as the grave. Nobody wants to say out loud what's obvious. That is the power of audacity. Obama's overthrow of Middle East peace is so shocking that no pundit even wants to call it what it is. American Jews has been silent. The left and Europe are pretending it didn't happen. The "neocons" are silent so far. (But Michael Ledeen is writing a Broadsides book about it.)This is the biggest news not fit to print in the New York Times. It's the biggest public secret in the world. But open your eyes, and you'll see it.Any sane observer has to wonder why the president did that. The pillar of Middle East peace, what there was of it, is now weakened, maybe fatally. It has to come from the combatants. It took three major wars to bring about that treaty.After Sadat was assassinated, his vice president, Hosni Mubarak, took over instead, and kept the peace with Israel intact for thirty years. Israel ceded the entire Sinai Desert to Egypt in return for that peace -- the biggest piece of land ever at stake in Arab-Israeli struggles. The Sinai is a huge land buffer, and when you're at war with a neighbor, you want to have plenty of land between you and your enemies. So Israel traded land for peace.Obama has "community disorganized" the Middle East, and he did it knowing what would happen. If you think our other at-risk allies aren't watching -- Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Saudi Arabia, Poland -- well, think again. If the United States stabs Egypt and Israel in the back, all the others are looking for safety. The Saudis are getting their own nukes. So will Japan and South Korea. Poland has signed a local self-defense treaty with former Soviet colonies.

So much for Obama, the Prince of Peace and Compassion, not the mention the Messiah of Hope and Progress. V.I. Lenin famously said that things have to get worse before they can get better. The only trouble is that Lenin only made things worse. That is why the Soviet Union gave up seventy miserable years after Lenin.This is the biggest foreign policy gamble by any American president, ever.Obama is dangerous for peace.Source here.

• "Lord Forgive them?"Obama asks CBC for Biblical faith in his agenda.(WE).President Obama made an appeal to the religious faith of black voters at a Congressional Black Caucus rally, likening Biblical prophets who had faith in God -- and so refused to worship an idol -- to the black voters who "keep the faith" by supporting him and his policies - and, he hopes, his reelection campaign.Obama opened the speech by mentioning the Biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, three captive Jews who were thrown into a fiery furnace because they would not worship a golden idol. Obama quoted a pastor who referred to the three men as "good crazy" for having that faith. He added that the pastor had attributed the same "good crazy" to him when he decided to run for president.Obama continued that analogy, equating the Jews' "faith in the things not seen" to the more mundane "belief that if you persevere a better day lies ahead."Obama added, "you and me, we're all a little bit crazy, but hopefully a good kind of crazy...We’re a good kind of crazy because no matter how hard things get, we keep the faith; we keep fighting; we keep moving forward."Obama then explained how he had "kept the faith" through various acts as president -- by responding to the economic crisis with the Dodd-Frank Wall Street regulations bill, through certain tax credits he had passed and through Obamacare. He finished with a plug for the American Jobs Act.The only "kind of crazy" on display in this speech is the one that says faith in Obama's policies is kind of like faith in God.Hmmmmm....."Beware of false prophets".A Pastor......Might that be Jeremiah Wright?Read the full story here.

• Sen. Mike Lee Is Right to Ask: Is Google a Problem?(BigGovernment).To many conservatives, it may seem surprising that Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) would echo antitrust concerns in his aggressive questioning of Google Chairman Eric Schmidt during this week’s hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights. Isn’t that more of a lefty thing? Well, yes and no. The left indeed tends to be altogether too, er, liberal in its use of anti-trust laws to control big business. But conservatives also need to guard America against bad policies and domineering, unfair businesses practices that distort markets and ultimately punish consumers. I believe this is where Sen. Lee was coming from in his line of argument against Schmidt.Antitrust aside, Google has danced very close to the line in terms of profiting from other companies’ property rights, for example. In the eyes of many experts, Google also has violated consumer privacy. It has heavily influenced public policy to protect and enhance its bottom line at the expense of other companies. Surely it’s worth asking if Google’s business, lobbying and legal strategies pose threats free enterprise.As Lee put it, “Whether or not Google formally qualifies as a monopoly under our antitrust laws, one thing is clear. Given its significant ability to steer e-commerce and the flow of online information, Google is in a position to help determine who will succeed and who will fail on the Internet.” American’s have a right to be concerned about the implications of Lee’s observation.I do not begrudge Google its success. It is an amazing company with a superior search offering and a clever business model. At the same time, Google has built its market dominance and cash position, at least in part, by appropriating, some might say misappropriating, the copyrighted content of others. For instance, Google “scrapes” content from other websites and sells advertising based on that scraped content. Google has also become dominant on mobile phones with its Android operating system, which arguably uses patented technology owned by other companies. Google has also played fast and loose with trademark protection—selling ads around other companies’ trademarks.Most notoriously, Google generated significant revenue from illegal pharmaceutical advertising—a practice to which it admitted and forfeited $500 million to avoid prosecution.Finally, Google is altogether too close to liberal politicians and political causes for my personal tastes. There is no crime in that, to be sure. But we need look no further than the front page headlines regarding the Solyndra scandal to know that when politicians and crony capitalists become too familiar, we the people are the victims.There is no doubt that we should be skeptical of antitrust enforcement and other marketplace regulation, for that matter. But faulting Lee for speaking out against Google is misguided. We should not fault the messenger, but instead examine the clear message. No entity—government or corporation—should be in a position to threaten free enterprise or property rights. It is altogether appropriate for elected leaders to ask questions.Read the full story here.

• Do Liberals Care About Palestinian Racism and Anti-Semitism?(Challah Hu Akbar).The Palestinian cause is increasingly supported by western "progressives" who also claim to be champions for tolerance, pluralism, and minority rights. In order to advocate for the Palestinians, progressives have been too willing to ignore the basic and unfortunate fact that racism, homophobia, xenophobia, and anti-Semitism are widespread and accepted in Palestinian society. Below are some images that you won't see -- or even hear about -- in left-wing advocacy for the Palestinians. The restrictions of my blog format do not permit me to share the multiple of visuals found in this original article. Therefore, I ask that you click here in order to view what so many of us have written about, visually presented and told you all about over the last many years. I do challenge those of you who described yourselves as liberals, progressives, independents to examine the images and honestly ask yourself am I willing to let the possibility enter my head, my mind, that those of us who describe ourselves differently might not be incorrect, evil or full of sh.. as I have been told so often. I challenge your sense of fairness, propriety and intelligence to begin to understand the nastiness that we live near every day here in Israel-thank you. For those who are in our camp so to speak, please share this with those who should finally see.Read and see the full story here.

• Related - Major Anti-Semitic Motifs in Arab Cartoons.Interview with Joël Kotek.Read and see the full story here.

• ‘Massive Jobs Shortfall’ Predicted for Global Economy, risk of the number doubling by the end of next year.(TheGuardian).The world's major economies are heading for a "massive jobs shortfall" by the end of next year if governments do not change their tack on policy, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) said in a study published on Monday.In the report, prepared with the OECD for G20 labour ministers meeting in Paris on Monday, the ILO said the group of developing and developed nations had seen 20m jobs disappear since the financial crisis in 2008.At current rates it would be impossible to recover them in the near term and there was a risk of the number doubling by the end of next year, it said."We must act now to reverse the slowdown in employment growth and make up for the jobs lost," ILO director general Juan Somavia said in a statement."Employment creation has to become a top macroeconomic priority."The number of people in work in the G20 has risen by 1% since 2010, but 1.3% annual growth is needed to return to pre-crisis employment levels by 2015, the ILO said."However, employment growth of less than 1% cannot be excluded given the slowdown of the world economy and the anaemic growth foreseen in several G20 countries," the report said. "Should employment grow at a rate of 0.8% until end 2012, now a distinct possibility, then the shortfall in employment would increase by some 20m to a total of 40m in G20 countries."Read the full story here.

• The Federal Reserve Plans to Identify “Key Bloggers” and Monitor Billions of Conversations About the Fed on Facebook, Twitter, Forums and Blogs.(Cryptogon).Is there are Federal Reserve link for this document?Here’s the document that ZeroHedge has produced:

          Sentiment Analysis And Social Media MonitoringSolution RFP

Request for Proposal (Event-6994)Event Information

Description:

Federal Reserve Bank of New York (“FRBNY”) is extending to suppliers an invitation to participate in an Sentiment Analysis And Social Media Monitoring Solution RFP bid process. The intent is to establish a fair andequitable partnership with a market leader who will who gather data from various social media outlets and newssources and provide applicable reporting to FRBNY. This Request for Proposal (“RFP”) was created in an effort tosupport FRBNY’s Social Media Listening Platforms initiative.The Federal Reserve Bank of New York intends to listen in on “billions of conversations” and to actually determine the “sentiment” of those that are participating in those conversations.

Of course it will be those conversations that are “negative” about the Federal Reserve that will be setting off the alarm bells.“Identify and reach out to key bloggers and influencers”Uh oh. So they plan to “identify” key bloggers and influencers?What exactly do they plan to do once they “identify” them?“The solution must be able to gather data from the primary social media platforms –Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Forums and YouTube.”Hmmmm......"FinanceWatch"?Read the full story here.

• US net neutrality rules finalized, in effect November 20.(ArsTechnica). Get ready, America—net neutrality finally comes to the Internet on November 20, 2011.That's the plan, at least. The FCC has just filed its final "open Internet" rules (PDF) with the Federal Register, which will publish them tomorrow and make them official. The rules go into effect on November 20, nearly a year after they were passed over Republican opposition on a 3-2 vote. (One of the FCC Commissioners who voted against the rules now works for Comcast.)But the plan will likely be derailed by lawsuits. Two, by Verizon and MetroPCS, were filed earlier this year but tossed because the rules had yet to be finalized. With tomorrow's printing in the Federal Register, the litigation floodgates will be thrown open and and complaints about the government overstepping its authority can start pouring in.Those complaints might well meet with success, given how the FCC went about the whole process. Rather than reclassifying broadband services in such a way that the FCC has clear jurisdiction over them, the agency relied instead on its much weaker "ancillary jurisdiction." (The legal rationale for this begins on p. 77 of the final rules, and the FCC gamely makes a case that it has the proper authority.) As law professor James Grimmelmann noted today in our subscriber-only webchat, "The FCC is in a real tangle here. I think if they reclassified broadband service (long story), they'd have a better shot at getting their rules to stick."Read the full story here.

• 'King' Obama sidesteps Congress again.US-Turkey agree on delivery schedule for Predators.(TodaysZaman).Turkey is expecting the delivery of Predators in June 2012, the Turkish defense minister said a day after the country's prime minister announced that Turkey has agreed with the US on a deal involving the transfer of US-engineered unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could prove crucial in combating terrorism.“We have agreed in principle [on the delivery of Predators]. Negotiations will continue,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quoted as saying by the Cihan news agency on Saturday in New York, where the Turkish leader was visiting on the occasion of the 66th session of the UN General Assembly. Erdoğan also noted that Turkey had offered to either purchase or lease the drones and that the two countries were still settling the details regarding the delivery of the Predators.Following up on the agreement, Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz told reporters on Saturday that the drones to be received from the US would be delivered to the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) in June of next year, reported the Anatolia news agency.“These [Predators] are UAVs with better qualities and features than the Herons,” Yılmaz said, and added that the Turkish-made Anka would also be ready for the TSK around the same time, as an alternative to Israeli-made Herons.Turkey was disappointed by Israel's failure to return six Herons it had sent to the country for maintenance, as it relies heavily on spy aircraft for surveillance missions that gather data on the activities of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) across the country's borders in the Southeast.Yılmaz did not give any details on the number of Predators the US would deliver to Turkey but acknowledged that Ankara had presented a request for the UAVs in line with the TSK's needs. The minister added that the US and Turkey have been strategic partners and are cooperating in combating terrorism, which necessitated that both “support each other with no conditions or prejudice.”Meanwhile, the domestically made Anka, named after the legendary flying creature of Persian mythology, was brought out of the hangar for the first time in July 2010 and is expected to provide Turkey with a crucial advantage in its fight against PKK terrorism. The Anka is capable of disrupting the electronic ware of enemy aircraft and has made Turkey the third country in the world, after the US and Israel, to engineer UAVs.Hmmmm.....I must have missed when the US Congress approved this?Or else 'King' Obama just 'overruled' Congress again?Read the full story here.

• Story that Facebook’s Charging Users in the future is a Myth.(ALLFaceBook).We can only speculate why there’s been a resurgence of the myth that Facebook will start charging users for the site.This falsehood resurfaced this week, so perhaps people believe that they can pay Facebook to restore their accounts to what they looked like before the news feed got revamped.Some folks may also think that the enhanced functionality of timeline will cost them money.Neither of these are correct, yet panicky posts that Facebook will charge users money continue to proliferate.Hmmm......Mea culpa,mea maxima culpa.Read the full story here.

• US linking Israel's missile shield to Turkey and Saudi Arabia.(IsraelMatzav).It should be interesting to hear what Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has to say about this story.You will recall that on Friday I reported on Eli Lake's Newsweek story that says that the Obama administration sold bunker busters to Israel in 2009.The full story is now out and it includes this little tidbit: The United States is linking the missile defense shields of its Middle East allies - including Israel, Turkey and Saudi Arabia - via the use of x-band radar which the US insists on controlling.Read the full story here.

• Report: Turkey operated agents in Israel to track soldiers.(YNet).Turkish intelligence officials have submitted to the state prosecution a list of 174 Israelis, mostly soldiers, who were involved in the 2010 raid on the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara ship, the Turkish newspaper Sabah reported Monday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tops the list as the "primary responsible party."Turkish newspaper Zaman went a step further and reported on its website that Ankara had also operated intelligence agents inside Israel to confirm the soldiers' identities. The Turkish government denies ever asking its National Intelligence Organization (MIT) to confirm the identities of Israeli commandos involved in the raid. Istanbul's deputy prosecutor said that a lawyer for the IHH submitted a list of soldiers' names to his office and said it will be examined. The Turkel Commission investigating the events of the 2010 raid on the Mavi Marmara has asked the Military Advocate General for materials regarding criminal records opened following the flotilla. It has also requested to view files concerning possible violations of laws of war involving the deaths or injuries of citizens. The materials will be examined by Sukkot. Last month, the Military Advocate General released a report concerning six flotilla events. The Turkel Commission could not rule on the cases. According to the report in the Sabah newspaper, the Israelis were identified from photographs and various media sources."Almost all of the Israeli soldiers who killed nine Turkish citizens and injured 30 others have been identified," the report claimed. It was stated that Israel's government has not responded to the Turkish Justice Ministry's demand to release a list of the individuals who took part in the operation, prompting the intelligence officials to pour over records of the raid. Facebook and Twitter were used later in the hunt for information.The fact-finding team examined the names of the commandos of Shayetet 13 – the Navy unit that took over the Gaza-bound vessel – and matched them up with the numerous photos used in the media. Furthermore, the officials reviewed correspondence written by soldiers whom they believed took part in the raid in order to confirm their participation. Names submitted by the IHH movement, which organized the flotilla, were used in the search as well. According to the report, the Turkish prosecution intends to request the Israeli authorities to verify whether the people on the list, which includes 140 photos of 174 Israelis who directly or indirectly participated in the raid, were indeed ivolved.Officials who allegedly contributed to the decision and issued the order to stop the Mavi Marmara, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, made it to the top of the list as well."All of the Israeli Cabinet ministers were responsible for the order," the report read. The list also includes former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, former Israel Navy Commander Eliezer Marom, former Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin and a variety of other high- and low-ranking officers. Moreover, it includes 10 photographs of soldiers who are yet to be identified.Hmmmmm......What's next?Predator drones to take them out?Read the full story here.

• Abbas Launches 'Palestinian Spring' in Ramallah.(ArutzSheva).Cheered by thousands, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was given a hero's welcome Sunday when he returned from his trip to the United Nations.“This is the popular Palestinian Spring,” he declared, calling for the official start of a non-violent intifada against Israel. “Raise your heads with pride; you are Palestinians!” he told the crowd that greeted him in Ramallah. The speech followed his application to the U.N. Security Council on Friday for recognition of the PA as a sovereign state, and its “full membership” in the international body.“The entire free world has accepted your history, your aspirations and your hopes with the utmost respect,” he told the gathering. “We told the world that today there is an Arab Spring – but also a Palestinian Spring. A non-violent Fighting Spring that will reach its goal."“Facing this determination – which I conveyed from you to the world – everyone stood up and appreciated your expectations and aspirations,” he told the cheering crowd. “Our diplomatic move, which has already begun, still has a long way to go,” he warned. “We must know that there will be those who will place obstacles in our path. They will block us and our existence here.”But, he added, “We have emphasized that we wish to obtain our rights via negotiations. The entire world was witness to the civility of this nation, which only demands its rights. We will remain on this land.”The U.N. speech, carefully geared to excite the PA street without inflaming it, was nevertheless seen by many in Israel as an exercise in official, institutional incitement “from the top.” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said over the weekend that the PA leader's speech from the podium at the U.N. General Assembly was the “worst example of anti-israel incitement and vitriol” he had ever heard.Throughout his address, Abbas referred to Israel as a “colonial occupying power” and accused the Jewish State of deliberately targeting civilians, arbitrarily destroying crops, and demolishing schools, mosques and hospitals. He demanded that the U.N. recognize Judea, Samaria and major portions of Israel's capital city, Jerusalem, as the PA's hoped-for state and that Israel end all construction in Jewish communities in those areas as a precondition for any talks.Abbas also accused Israel of destroying Islamic holy sites and claimed the IDF sent “attack dogs” against Palestinian Authority Arabs. In addition, he also called for the release of all jailed PA terrorists, including murderers with blood on their hands, whom he referred to as “political prisoners.”During his trip back to Ramallah, Abbas told the London-based Arab daily newspaper a-Sharq al-Awsat that Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was the “last” leader with whom he could reach a final status agreement, “since he holds tough and almost ideological positions.”Read the full story here.

• Qaddafi relatives have reportedly left Algeria and are now in Egypt.(AlArabiya).Relatives of Muammar Qaddafi who had crossed into Algeria after Tripoli fell into rebel hands last month are now in Egypt, a day after the Algerian government criticized the release of an audio recording by Qaddafi’s daughter Aisha, an Algerian newspaper reported on Monday.The el-Khabar daily reported that eight of Qaddafi's relatives, possibly including his daughter Aisha, who had crossed into the country on August 29 boarded an Egypt Air plane t Algiers’ Houari Boumediene Airport on Saturday evening.Algeria’s foreign minister, Mourad Medelci, had denounced as "unacceptable" an audio recording by Qaddafi’s daughter criticizing Libya’s National Transitional Council (NTC). Medelci, who was attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York, pledged to “take measures” against Qaddafi’s relatives. Neither Algerian nor Egyptian officials have confirmed the reports. In her first public remarks since the fall of Tripoli a month ago, Aisha Qaddafi accused Libya’s new leaders of being traitors, noting that some of them were members of Qaddafi’s regime before defecting in the civil war.“Those who have betrayed the pledge they offered [to Qaddafi], how come they won’t betray you?” she said in a warning to Libyans.“I assure you, he is fine, a believer in God, in good spirits, is carrying his gun and is fighting side by side with the warriors,” she said.The prerecorded four-minute message was broadcast Friday on the Syrian-based al-Rai TV, which has become Qaddafi’s main mouthpiece. The elder Qaddafi, his chief spokesman, and his son and one-time heir apparent, Seif al-Islam, have also released statements through the channel since the takeover of Tripoli.Read the full story here.

• Syrian tanks pound town near Homs amid increasing numbers of army defectors.(AlArabiya).Syrian tanks pounded a town on a strategic highway overnight, injuring at least three people during a military crackdown on dissent in the central region of Homs, activists and residents said on Monday.Homs has become a major flashpoint between troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and army defectors, backing pro-democracy protesters demanding the president's overthrow.Three inhabitants of al-Rastan were injured when pro-Assad forces opened fire with heavy machine guns mounted on the tanks surrounding the town, on the main northern highway leading to Turkey, said residents.“There are around 60 tanks and armored vehicles on the eastern edge of Rastan alone. All communications are cut and the firing is being directed at the street and buildings,” Abu Qassem, a resident of al-Rastan, told Reuters by satellite phone.Activists have reported a military push into towns and villages north of the city of Homs, 165 km (100 miles) north of Damascus, where increasing numbers of defectors have been organizing and mounting guerrilla raids on loyalist posts.Faced with expanding street protests demanding an end to 41 years of Assad family rule, the president has sent troops and tanks into cities and towns across the country.The military crackdown has killed at least 2,700 people, including 100 children, according to the United Nations.Syrian authorities say 700 police and army have been killed during the unrest which they blame on “terrorists” and “mutineers.”Assad has said foreign powers are using the unrest to divide Syria, and added any state would use similar techniques to end a revolt.Homs, together with the northwestern province of Idlib on the border with Turkey, has traditionally provided the bulk of majority Sunni foot soldiers in the military, which is effectively commanded by Assad’s brother Maher and led by officers from Assad’s minority Alawite sect.The two regions have seen some of the biggest street protests against Assad in the last few weeks.Troops earlier stormed the villages of Za’faraneh and Deir al-Jin, between Rastan and the town of Talbiseh to the south, local activists said, adding that there was no immediate information on casualties.Syria’s crackdown protests have sparked international outrage and rebukes from Syria’s powerful northern neighbor Turkey, once among Assad's keenest backers.Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan told CNN in an interview broadcast on Sunday that Bashar will be ousted “sooner or later” by his own people.“You can never remain in power through cruelty. You can never stand before the will of the people,” Erdogan said.Hmmmm......Stronger words are for Israel?"Empty barrels make the most noise"?Read the full story here.

• Pakistani teenage girl expelled from school for blasphemy.(AlArabiya).A Pakistani school expelled a 13-year-old Christian girl for alleged blasphemy and her mother was transferred from her job as a nurse near the town where Osama bin Laden was killed, officials said Monday.The conservative Muslim country has been increasingly criticized in the West for tough anti-blasphemy laws that make defaming Islam punishable by death and over the persecution of the tiny non-Muslim minority.Faryal Tauseef, an eighth grade student at Sir Syed High School in the northwest garrison town of Havelian, was asked with her class to define “naat”, a style of poem written in praise of the Prophet Mohammed.The town is just south of Abbottabad, the garrison city where U.S. special forces killed the al-Qaeda leader in a covert raid on May 2, which exposed the Pakistan military to accusations of incompetence or complicity.“In her explanation Faryal wrote a word which was blasphemous,” school administrator Junaid Sarfraz told AFP.“The girl confessed, saying that she did it by mistake and the school administration, after consulting local clerics, decided to rusticate (expel) her.”According to her teacher, the girl made the mistake “intentionally” and the matter was referred to clerics because she had aroused similar suspicions of blasphemy in the past, Sarfraz added.Faryal’s mother, a staff nurse, had also been transferred out of town, he said.“The girl has been expelled for using derogatory words and her mother has been moved to another place,” district commissioner Syed Imtiaz Hussain Shah told AFP.Police said no case had been registered and that the matter was considered over following a pardon from Muslim clerics.The government says it has no intention of reforming Pakistan’s tough anti-blasphemy law, introduced in 1986, despite the assassinations of a leading politician in January and a Christian cabinet minister in March.Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) member Salman Taseer was killed by his bodyguard and minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti assassinated en route to a cabinet meeting for their opposition to the law.Taseer had supported a Christian mother of five sentenced to death in November 2010 for alleged blasphemy in the central province of Punjab.Pakistan has yet to execute anyone for blasphemy. Most of those given the death penalty have their sentences overturned or commuted on appeal.Religious parties strongly defend the law.Hmmmmmmm......"Interfaith dialog in it's natural Habitat?"Read the full story here.

• China could open up to Arctic with Iceland deal.(HurriyetDaily).A Chinese businessman’s plans to buy a swathe of Iceland for a resort have sparked local scepticism, amid speculation it is a bid by Beijing to get its hands on Arctic riches.The melting Arctic ice cap means lucrative oil and gas deposits under the seabed could soon become accessible, and shorter shipping routes between Asia and Europe will open up.Observers suggest those prospects may be the real reason behind property tycoon Huang Nubo’s plans to buy 300 square-kilometres (200 square-miles) of Icelandic wildnerness. Huang says he wants to build a luxury resort with a hotel, golf course and sports facilities, and Europe’s biggest nature reserve.The purchase could give China a foothold in the region - enabling it to establish contacts and gather information - before the Arctic treasure chest opens up.“It is likely that the Chinese government will find every way to enhance cooperation at multiple levels ... to lay the groundwork for future involvement in the construction and operation of infrastructural hubs” in the Arctic, Embla Eir Oddsdottir, project manager at The Stefansson Arctic Institute in Iceland, told Agence France-Presse. “The possibility of shipping and transport across the Arctic is very important for China.”With the icecap melting in summertime, the route between the Atlantic and the Pacific will shorten the sailing distance between Shanghai and Europe by about 6,400 kilometers (4,000 miles).“In talks with Icelandic authorities, (the Chinese) have made a point of saying it was very plausible” that China would use Iceland as a trans-Arctic shipping port, the chairman of the Icelandic parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Arni Thor Sigurdsson, told AFP.Marc Lanteigne, a senior lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and an expert on China’s rise as a strategic and economic power, said there were “very strong and very opaque links between large Chinese businesses and the country’s government.”China could especially be eying the up to 160 billion barrels of oil believed to be in the Arctic. “China is now importing more than 50 percent of its crude oil consumed, and like other large economies is worried about the safety of petroleum imports from the Middle East and is seeking alternative sources,” Lanteigne said.He noted that Beijing had been active in the oil trade in Central Asia, the Caspian region and sub-Saharan Africa in recent years.“It is therefore very likely that China would want to increase its presence in the Arctic out of concern for being left out of oil exploration there.”Sigurdsson said China had “no direct claim to natural resources” in the region, but could “become a participant ... by cooperating with states or companies searching for resources.”Observers said there was no concrete indication Beijing would use Huang’s land purchase to hunt for Arctic riches. Yet his plans have raised eyebrows in Reykjavik, where Interior Minister Oegmundur Jonasson has said he would scrutinize the application carefully.Huang has offered to buy the partially state-held land, known as Grimsstadir a Fjoellum, for $10 million and wants to invest a total of $100 million (70 million euros). The businessman has said he is attracted by Iceland’s wilderness and pledged to respect the local environment.Hmmmmmm...........And we all know how China 'respects and protects' nature.Read the full story here.

MFS - The Other News

                       Morning Posting.

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity today.More info here.

• Japan - Latest official Situation Update No. 138.138
  On 30.06.2011 at 11:23 GMT+2
  
  A small amount of radioactive substances was found from urine samples of all of 10 children in Fukushima surveyed by a Japanese civic association and a French nongovernmental organization, the groups said Thursday. David Boilley, president of the Acro radioactivity measuring body, told a news conference in Tokyo that the survey on 10 boys and girls aged between 6 and 16 in Fukushima city suggested there was a high possibility that children in and near the city had been exposed to radiation internally. The highest levels found by the survey were 1.13 becquerels of radioactive cesium-134 per 1 litre of urine from an 8-year-old girl, and 1.30 becquerels of cesium-137 in a 7-year-old boy. The city is located 60 kilometres north-west of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station, which has been leaking radiaoactive material into the environment since it was hit by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. The radiation levels detected did not represent an immediate risk to health, but those two isotopes of cesium have half-lives of two and 30 years respectively, raising concerns about the long-term contamination of the environment and locally grown foodstuffs.
  
  The Fukushima Network for Saving Children from Radiation, consisting of local parents, said the group would urge the central and local governments to have all citizens in the prefecture undergo detailed tests soon. Acro previously investigated radiation exposure of children who lived near the site of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), which runs the plant, started its work Thursday to transfer low-level radiation-tainted water to a large floating container, which has a capacity to collect about 10,000 tons of water. TEPCO said some 8,000 tons of water that the operator has stored at a temporary tank would be moved to the container, which is berthed along the quay near the plant, Kyodo reported. The water came from the turbine buildings of reactors 5 and 6, and most of the water was believed to be seawater left after devastating tsunami waves hit the plant on March 11. TEPCO has struggled to deal with 110,000 tons of contaminated water at the plant while a newly-installed water-treatment system has halted several times due to water leaks and other technical problems.
  Situation Update No. 137 - On 29.06.2011 at 03:40 GMT+2
  
  Tonnes of radioactive water was discovered to have leaked into the ground from the Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan's nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday. About 15 tonnes of water with a low level of radiation leaked from a storage tank at the plant, on the Pacific coast 240 km (150 miles) north of Tokyo, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said. Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said it was still investigating the cause of the leak, which was repaired after being discovered around noon on Tuesday. Vast amounts of water contaminated with varying levels of radiation have accumulated in storage tanks at the plant after being used by the utility to cool reactors damaged when their original cooling systems were knocked out by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. Tepco is trying to use a decontamination system that cleans radioactive water so it can be recycled to cool the reactors, but has encountered technical glitches.
  Situation Update No. 136  -  On 28.06.2011 at 10:53 GMT+2
  
  Radioactive strontium has been found on the seabed near the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, Kyodo reported on Tuesday. Tokyo Electric Power Company said strontium-89 and -90 was discovered in the seabed soil about 3 kilometers off the coast, some 20 kilometers north and south of the nuclear complex. Between 10 and 44 becquerels per kilogram of strontium-90 were detected, which has a half-life of 29 years. Shigeharu Kato, a member of the Nuclear Safety Commission, said further examination was needed to determine if or how the substances can accumulate in marine life, the NHK news agency reported. A 9.0-magnitude quake struck off Japan's northeast coast on March 11, triggering a tsunami and explosions at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, which caused the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. According to Japanese scientists, the tsunami triggered by the quake washed over 561 square kilometers in 23 prefectures. Huge waves reached 10 kilometers (6 miles) inland destroying everything on their way. The disaster destroyed over 151,000 buildings and killed at least 15,000 people, while 9,893 people still remain unaccounted for. The government has previously said the damage from the disaster could total $184 billion.Source : Here .

• UPDATED ! Radioactive cesium was detected in processed tea that was made from leaves that elementary school children picked in Tokyo as part of their school curriculum, it has been learned. The Itabashi Ward Office announced on June 30 that 2,700 becquerels of radioactive cesium -- in excess of the government's provisional limit -- was detected in processed tea that used leaves picked at a plantation in the ward by some 300 students of local elementary schools. The processed tea is set to be disposed of, while none of the children have suffered any health problems. The tea plantation is dedicated to providing visitors with opportunities to pick leaves and does not ship its harvest to the market. According to the ward office, the tea-picking class took place on May 9, and fourth- and fifth-grade students from three public elementary schools in the ward participated in the event. When the approximately 20 kilograms of processed tea -- made of some 80 kilograms of first-harvest leaves that the students had picked -- was screened, 1,300 becquerels of cesium 134 per kilogram and 1,400 becquerels of cesium 137 per kilogram were detected. Following the revelation, ward officials picked second-harvest tea leaves at the plantation on June 22 and detected 350 becquerels of cesium from raw tea leaves. The ward office will conduct screenings of locally-grown agricultural products but will not regulate the shipment of tea leaves as there is no other tea plantation in the ward. It is the first time that radioactive cesium has been detected in tea leaves grown in Tokyo. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government's survey had previously detected no radioactive substances exceeding the government limit in agricultural products grown in the capital.Source.
  
  
• Japan : For the most accurate info on the nuclear disaster go to : Paul Langley's Nuclear History Blog.Here.

• Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez treated for cancer.(Al-Jazeera)Video - Hugo Chavez makes his first televised speech after surgery in Cuba and says he will "overcome" health battle.The Venezuelan leader, Hugo Chavez, has admitted in a television address that he had a tumour but had undergone a successful operation in Cuba to extract the cancerous cells and was on the road to full recovery.Chavez, 56, made his first televised speech to the nation on Thursday, weeks after he was hospitalised in the Cuban capital, Havana, sparking widespread speculation he might be seriously ill."They confirmed the existence of a tumourous abscess, with the presence of cancerous cells, which required another operation to extract the tumour completely," he said, standing at a lectern by a Venezuelan flag and a painting of his hero, South American independence leader Simon Bolivar."I deeply appreciate the demonstrations of solidarity by Venezuelans and other brotherly people."Chavez said the medical process was "slow and careful" and that he was determined to "overcome" the health battle.Comparing his health problem to a previous dark moment - a short-lived 2002 coup against him - Chavez promised he would be back in typically grandiose language."I want to talk to you about the rising sun, I think that we have emerged," he said.The Venezuelan government had earlier said he was recovering from an abcess in the pelvis in Cuba, from where Thursday's speech was broadcast.Shortly after the speech, Venezuela's vice-president, Elias Jaua, flanked by government ministers, said on state television that the wide-reaching socialist reforms would be "deepened" despite Chavez's ill health.Nevertheless, there is huge uncertainty about who could replace Chavez, given the fact that Venezuela's political structures are so closely tied to his persona."Chavez is really the man of Venezuela," Al Jazeera's Mariana Sanchez said. "There's really not a figure in the ruling party, or even in the opposition, that will match the charisma that Hugo Chavez has."Analysts said Chavez's prolonged absence could prompt infighting among his allies ahead of the 2012 elections."From the president's speech, it is impossible to deduce if he will or will not be in a physical state and the right mood to go into the 2012 campaign," Luis-Vicente Leon, a local analyst, said.Eva Golinger, a lawyer and writer in the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, told Al Jazeera there was "no sign" Chavez would not be able to continue as president."He gave his speech ... from a very energetic and strong and charismatic position and so it seems as though he's recovering well," she said."He is someone who has faced all kinds of difficulties and obstacles, particularly during his presidency, and so it seems as though he is going to pull through this one just fine."Until Thursday, the official line had been that he was recovering well from an operation to remove a pelvic abscess and would return soon.Hmmmmm.......Prostate cancer?Average lifespan after surgery 5 years.Read the full story here.

• Obama: Still Getting the Hang of Answering Questions.(NationalReview).Has Obama ever given a bravura performance at a press conference? No wonder he goes three months or so without doing them.Today he mentioned a tax break for corporate jets six times. He didn’t mention that he signed legislation preserving the tax code provision into law, or that the grand total of the savings of ending that tax break would be about $3 billion over ten years.The man who flies anywhere he wants, anytime, cost-free, complained at great length that other people’s private jets are insufficiently taxed. yesterday, Obama flew on Air Force One to Philadelphia, Pa., to attend two DNC fundraisers,denouncing the current tax rates on corporate jets, without anyone remarking on the irony.

What I think this reveals is that Barack Obama is not used to being challenged. Most of us have scoffed at his predictable straw men, his off-the-cuff references to tonsil-stealing doctors, his exhausted, “some on the right say we should take this extreme path, some on the left take this extreme path, but I choose this sensible path in the middle” framing of every issue.

As we recall from his attacks upon Paul Ryan at GWU, the Supreme Court justices at the State of the Union, and his jabs at Pete Hoekstra, Obama loves to go after his opponents in national addresses, with his targets in the audience, unable to respond. In the setting of the grandiose national address, there is rarely a rebuttal. Any interruption to dispute the facts — like, say, Rep. Joe Wilson yelling out, “You LIE!” during an address to Congress — comes across as rude to the office of the presidency. The Supreme Court is completely unused to being criticized to their faces; members of Congress are used to the back-and-forth of debates on the floor in which every accusation and assertion can be rebutted and cross-examined.

So even ten questions from the White House press corps can take Obama off his game. Among the highlights of today:

• Asked about whether the War Powers Act was constitutional, he responded, “I’m not going to put my constitutional law professor hat on here.” Er, wait, wasn’t that a reason folks were supposed to vote for you?

• Asked whether marriage was a civil right – a yes or no question that obviously put him on the spot about gay marriage – he began talking about separate issues, like hospital visitations.

• Occasionally Obama’s gaffes would seem strangely honest, like when he said, “I’ll keep on giving you the same answer until I give you a different one,” on gay marriage, or “I don’t even have to get to the Constitutional question,” rather bluntly acknowledging he was ignoring Chuck Todd’s actual question on the War Powers Act.

• The President constantly infuriated by the perception that he hates the private sector responded to a question, “The business community always complains about regulations.” Unlike unions, trial lawyers, public sector employees, apparently.

• Asked about the ATF “Fast and Furious” operation, Obama said that Attorney General Eric Holder made very clear that he would have opposed the operation… you know, the one that occurred on his watch.

• Discussing the DREAM Act, Obama said, “Kids who grow up here and think of themselves as Americans… let’s make sure those kids can stay.” There’s no dispute that many of these children and teens often have heartbreaking stories, and no real emotional or physical connection to their country of legal citizenship. But thinking of yourself as an American is not the same as being an American. Citizenship is not a state of mind.

•“It’s time to stop playing games,” he concluded, and then ended the press conference for the next event on his schedule: welcoming the WNBA Champion Seattle Storm to the White House Rose Garden.

Obama survives difficult questions by avoiding them and waiting for the world to move on. His Republican opponents must challenge him, early and often, and consistently.Hmmmmm........"The Truth Shall Set You Free".Read the full story here.

• Alaska to EPA: Suck It.(ChamberPost).Big energy news was broken at today's press conference at the Chamber. Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (via teleconference) and Alaska Commissioner of Natural Resources Dan Sullivan announced the state would allow drilling off a strip of state-owned land, expanding energy production: It would allow the state to start allowing drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, up to three miles off the federally protected regions of ANWR and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, bypassing the need for federal permission.

While the state has no control over drilling in ANWR, it does own the three miles of Arctic Ocean just off the coast—after those three miles, the federal government owns the waters. Officials say it stands to reason that that three-mile ribbon likely cuts through the vast oil deposits believed to lie beneath ANWR and the Arctic Ocean. Alaskan officials and oil companies hope that by drilling in that strip, they can tap into up to a dozen giant oil pools that would otherwise be off-limits.Karen Harbert, president and CEO of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, who was also at the press conference, was happy with the news:

America is in serious need of more domestic energy production, but the federal government has thrown up nothing but roadblocks. According to government estimates, U.S. oil production will be down 90 million barrels in 2012—a direct result of the Obama Administration’s approach. With the release of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the Administration has finally acknowledged that there is a need to increase supply. However, the Five Year Plan for oil and natural gas exploration they have proposed takes new areas off the table—which could make us even more reliant on foreign oil in the future.Today, Governor Parnell and Commissioner Sullivan have announced a plan for Alaska that will start to change that equation.Hmmmmm......Reaction from Emperor "WTF"?Read the full story here.

• Congressman Asks IRS to Investigate CAIR.(TIP).Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., asked the IRS Monday to investigate whether the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has illegally received or solicited funds from foreign governments.The letter, sent to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, was written in response to news that CAIR has lost its IRS tax exempt status for failing to properly file annual tax reports, known as form 990s, for three years in a row.The fact that CAIR's donations are no longer tax deductible was exposed last week by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. CAIR's national entities, CAIR-National and the CAIR Foundation, were both included on a list of hundreds of thousands of organizations that had lost their status for failing to file the paperwork.But Rep. Wolf indicated that CAIR differs from those thousands of other organizations because it was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator (UCC) in the case of a U.S. Muslim charity found guilty of funneling millions of dollars to Hamas. When CAIR tried to have its named removed from the UCC list, a U.S. district court judge declined to strike CAIR's name."Given CAIR's status…this failure to comply with federal disclosure laws is all the more troubling," Rep. Wolf wrote.Rep. Wolf expressed concern over CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad's letter to Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which solicited money and praised Gaddafi. Wolf also asked the IRS if it is aware that Awad tried to solicit funds from Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir, who has been indicted internationally as a war criminal.CAIR told Fox News that it hopes to appeal to the IRS and gain retroactive tax-exempt status. That would mean that any donations accepted during the interim would be tax deductible upon CAIR's reinstatement."We'll be doing whatever's necessary…to rectify the situation," CAIR Spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. CAIR has 15 months to turn in papers explaining why the organization failed to file, and to submit the missing or corrected annual forms and a new application for tax exempt status.Hooper said that CAIR filed properly in the past few years, but that the problems come from "questions" over tax filings dating back to 2006 or 2007.State Department records obtained by the Investigative Project on Terrorism show CAIR sent delegations in 2006 to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates seeking millions of dollars in support. CAIR-National's most recent available tax records are from 2005. A required attachment of donations over $5,000 to that year's filing showed a $600,000 donation from Saudi businessman Adnan Bogary. According to the list, it was the single largest donation to CAIR for that tax year.Hmmmmm.....Any donations to Obama?Read the full story here.

• Mayor Michael Bloomberg Wants to Take Away Your Guns Before Al Qaeda Gets Them.(BigGovernment).Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his little outfit “Mayors Against Illegal Guns” are at it again. Hoping to gain traction for what has heretofore been an absolutely pathetic gun control campaign, Bloomberg is rolling out all the stops by trying to scare us into thinking Al Qaeda agents are buying their guns at U.S. gun shows.I’m not kidding: Bloomberg’s latest television ad contains clips of an American-turned-Islamist advising his comrades to buy their weapons at U.S. gun shows.The ad is very, very sloppy, and full of factual errors. Like when the Islamist says, “You can go down to a gun show and come away with a fully-automatic assault rifle.” I’m sorry, but that’s just not true. Fully automatic weapons are subject to strict federal regulations above and beyond the normal, all too stringent, regulations on semi-automatic firearms in this country. To purchase a fully automatic weapon you have to live in a state that allows them, go through a 3 to 6 month process of federal background checks, pay a significant federal firearms tax, and receive approval by local law enforcement authorities, among other things.To be honest, it’s sick that Bloomberg is so desperate to take away our guns that he’d actually present such an out-and-out lie by an Islamist as justification for limiting our access to firearms.Other problems with Bloomberg’s latest ad campaign deal more with issues the ad raises than the ad itself. For instance, instead of contending that U.S. gun shows are a “national security threat” because members of Al Qaeda can supposedly buy guns there, Bloomberg should be lambasting a Homeland Security Department that’s so inept it allows terrorists to enter the country to buy guns.Moreover, I don’t think Bloomberg realizes it, but he’s made a great case for profiling gun buyers the way we should be profiling airline and train passengers throughout the country. Laws should allow gun sellers to refuse sales to Islamists who dress the way the gentleman in Bloomberg’s ad is dressed. (I mean, seriously folks, it’s not like he’d be hard to spot in a crowd.)The refusal to profile forces our government to treat everyone the same: which means, that in order to keep “terrorists” from buying guns at gun shows Bloomberg is pushing for a law that keeps us all from buying guns at gun shows.What Bloomberg is trying to do to law abiding citizens under the guise of saving us from terrorism is absolutely shameful. The good news is that he has exaggerated the situation considerably. The bad news is that he is not in the least embarrassed to attack our 2nd Amendment rights again and again.Hmmmmm..........“I bring reason to your ears, and, in language as plain as ABC, hold up truth to your eyes.” Thomas Paine.Read the full story here.

• Texas Gov. Rick Perry urges US attorney general Holder to act against pro-Palestinian protesters.(IsraelMatzav).Governor Rick Perry (R-Tx) has urged Attorney General Eric Holder to take legal action against Americans participating in the flotilla of fools. Perry wrote that he had information that American citizens were aboard two U.S.-flagged ships that plan to challenge the blockade on the Gaza Strip. He urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to take legal steps to stop them from taking part, or to prosecute them if they make the attempt.“The state of Israel is a friend and critical ally of the United States, and the only stable democracy in an increasingly unstable and hostile region,” wrote Perry, a vocal supporter of Israel who is considering a run for president in 2012. “These initiatives to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of the Gaza Strip is an unacceptable provocation.”Under federal law, anyone who “prepares a means for, or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition” against a friendly country can be fined or jailed for three years. Perry also suggested that Holder prosecute the protesters for providing materials or assistance to a terrorist organization.Hmmmm.....Don't expect anything happening soon.Read the full story here.

• Obama administration puts Israel on list of countries that support terrorism, removes North Korea.(BarracudaBrigade).It is only fair that deluded and self-loathing Jews who continue to support the despot in the White House despite his relentless campaign against the Jews should be the first on the Obama trains. And they are coming.Obama's relentless pounding on the Jews mimics previous dictatorial leaders in recent history who promoted alienation of the Jews in concert with national socialism (another Obama favorite).

Obama's anti-semitism is meticulously documented in my book, The Post American Presidency: The Obama Administration's War on America.

Obama Administration Puts Israel On List Of Countries That Support Terrorism Yid with Lid

Only in the twisted world of the Obama Administration, where allies are trashed, and enemies are embraced, could the tiny nation of Israel, on the front lines of the war on terror for decades, be on a list of 36 nations which “have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members.”

As reported by CNS News

The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General published the list of "specially designated countries" as an appendix to an unclassified May 11 report--"Supervision of Aliens Commensurate With Risk"--that was publicly posted on the Internet. (The appendix is on page 18 of the document.)

As a matter of policy, according to the inspector general’s report, citizens of Israel and other “specially designated countries” are subjected to a special security screening called a “Third Agency Check” (TAC) when they are actually detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the division of the Department of Homeland Security responsible for enforcing the immigration laws.The five countries on the list that do not have majority Muslim populations--Kazakhstan (47 percent Muslim), Eritrea (36.5 percent Muslim), Israel (16.9 percent Muslim), the Philippines (5 percent Muslim) and Thailand (4.6 percent)--have had internal problems with radical Muslim terrorists, as reported by the State Department.

Isn't that kind of blaming the victim?OK lets get this straight. Based on new Department of Homeland Security procedures, illegal immigrants who are caughtbreaking the law will not be deported, but the Inspector General is now recommending that every Israeli that visits the US should be subject to special screening procedures.Wait! It gets crazier:

Even though the adminisration includes Israel among “specially designated countries” that it believes "have shown a tendency to promote, produce, or protect terrorist organizations or their members,” ICE Spokeswoman Gillian Christensen told CNSNews.com that the U.S. also considers Israel, as well as some other countries on the “specially designated countries” list, as partners in the struggle against terrorism.

“The U.S. does not and never has considered Israel to have links to terrorism, but rather they are a partner in our efforts to combat global terrorism,” Christensen said in a written statement. “Countries may have been included on the list because of the backgrounds of arrestees, not because of the country’s government itself.”

OH Israelis will now be subject to extra screening because the country arrests terrorists.

That makes sense?ICE declined to say who put Israel on the list or when Israel was put there. However, in her written statement, ICE spokeswoman Christensen said the “specially designated country” list had been created "at least" seven years ago--which would have been during the presidency of George W. Bush--and that ICE was not responsible for creating it. True but when this final list was proposed in March 2008 Israel was not on the list but North Korea was, today that is reversed.“So many federal agencies have created different lists that U.S. officials contemplated adopting a single one to streamline the process, Stark wrote,” said the McClatchey report. “The proposed list, which officials said had yet to be adopted, includes 35 countries, most with significant Muslim or Arab populations.”“The group of agencies--which included ICE, the National Security Agency and U.S. Customs and Border Protection--not only recommended one list but also suggested an interagency definition of ‘special interest alien,’” said the McClatchey report. “Under the proposal, a special interest alien would be an immigrant with terrorist ties or an immigrant who by nationality, ‘ethnicity or other factors may have ties or sympathies’ with the listed country.”

The 35 countries plus the West Bank and Gaza that were on the proposed list discussed in the ICE memo uncovered by McClatchey in March 2008 almost exactly matches the “specially designated countries” on the list published by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General on May 11, 2011. There are only two differences: North Korea was on the list proposed in 2008; it is not on the May 2011 list. Israel was not on the listproposed in 2008; it is on the May 2011 list.

See how this administration cares about Israel? Even though the list was already set, they made a change to put our ally on this special list. Boy oh boy, just like he is with Great Britain, whose Queen he gave an Ipod full of his speeches and Broadway Show tunes, Barack Obama is a real friend of Israel.Obama always says that despite his constant criticism of Israel, America will always have a special partnership with the Jewish State. Now we understand he means putting Israel on a "special" terrorism watch list.Hmmmmm......As i said before Israel has nothing to fear but Barack HUSSEIN Obama. Read the full story here.

• Israel - Obama regime has no problem with illegal Mosque building in Jerusalem.(ArutzSheva).Construction of a mosque near the grave of late prime minister Menachem Begin and Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook has been under way since October despite court orders to stop. Attendees at the recent President's Conference in Jerusalem were shown pictures of the construction.On Thursday, the Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem (National Unity-NRP), David Hadari, arrived at the illegal building site in person to serve a court order to cease and desist, accompanied by Council Member Elisha Peleg.The action, undertaken to publicize the lax enforcement of the law against massive Arab illegal construction in East Jerusalem, was an object lesson that proved just how unequal enforcement of the law is against those building without permits in the city.According to Hadari, “The last straw was this massive illegal construction on the extension of the Mount of Olives, with a mosque located only a few meters from the gravesites of Eliezer ben Yehuda, the reviver of the Hebrew language, Rav Tzvi Yehuda Kook, head of Merkaz HaRav Yeshiva and of Prime Minister Menachem Begin.”Hadari arrived holding the administrative cease and desist order which he handed to the construction workers.The workers ignored the order. Councilmen who arrived at the mosque said that the police and the government are responsible for not enforcing the order, and that the police are afraid to enforce the law in eastern Jerusalem, particularly against the contruction of a mosque.Elisha Peleg said that the government and law enforcement system should act against Imams and illegal mosques, as they seem to have the courage to do against rabbis.Hadari said that unless work is stopped immediately, there are measures the municipality could employ, including the confiscation of equipment such as tractors and trucks.Hadari ruefully expressed hopes that the government will instruct the police to enforce the law against the illegal mosque as it does elsewhere in Jerusalem.The High Court recently decided to seal the synagogue which was being built by a private donor during the period of the building freeze at the El Matan North Samaria community, ignoring another illegal mosque being built nearby. Hmmmmm..........Answer to building permit problems?Read the full story here.

• Two Ivory Coast Brothers  Crucified on “the example of Christ” by Muslim Loyalists.(VinIenco).Two peasant brothers were brutally crucified on “the example of Christ” as forces loyal to Ivory Coast President Alassane Ouattara continue to target perceived supporters of his ousted Christian predecessor, Laurent Gbagbo.Raphael Aka Kouame died of his injuries; incredibly his younger brother, Kouassi Privat Kacou, survived the ordeal. The pair were badly beaten and tortured before being crudely nailed to cross-shaped planks by their hands and feet with steel spikes on 29 May.The brothers were falsely accused of hiding weapons in their home village of Binkro, which has been targeted by Ouattara supporters as the birthplace of a key enemy. They are looking for Prefect Koko Djei, President of the General Council of Oumé and an official in Gbagbo’s Ivorian Popular Front party, who is accused of distributing weapons to young Oumé men. The brothers repeatedly denied any involvement in a weapons cache, but their pleas were ignored.After crucifying the brothers, Ouattara’s men took them on an extensive search of Binkro, but they found only a store of medical equipment and supplies, which they looted. The seriously wounded pair were then taken to prison in Oumé, where Raphael died in the night.This is just one of the many atrocities that have been committed as fighting between Ouattara and Gbagbo supporters has continued in the wake of the disputed presidential election last November. Christians have been caught up in the conflict as perceived supporters of Gbagbo. Support for the two men is split broadly along geographical and religious lines, with the predominantly Muslim north largely backing Ouattara, a Muslim from that region, while support for Gbagbo, a Christian, comes from the mainly Christian south.Hmmmm......"Interfaith Dialog" in it's natural habitat.Read the full story here.

• Libya: War and rape.(Video).(Al-Jazeera). Muammar Gaddafi, his son Saif and his intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi, were indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) this week charged with crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the Libyan uprising. The ICC said there were "reasonable grounds" to believe that the three men were responsible for the murder and persecution of civilians.The charges are based on an investigation by the court's chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, launched in February at the behest of the UN Security Council.  So far the indictment relates only to the first weeks of the conflict, but it is likely to expand to cover subsequent events. If so, then the court may also be asked to rule on allegations that Gaddafi's regime has used rape as a weapon against its opponents.  These claims first surfaced in March when a Libyan woman, Eman al-Obeidi, burst into a Tripoli hotel and told journalists she had been raped by security forces. Though she was quickly bundled away, other similar accusations have since emerged.   As Al Jazeera's Sue Turton has been finding out, getting evidence to substantiate the claims is far from easy. Some of the content of this film is disturbing.Read and see the full story here.